Anvil Storage Utilities Releases New Storage and SSD Benchmark

If you are a regular of The SSD Review, you may have noticed a new set of benchmarks in our past few reviews as we were politely asked to do a bit of beta testing.

The software is called Anvil Storage Utilities and we think this report (and introduction) is going to grab the interest of consumers, enthusiasts, reviewers as well as manufacturers alike. Oh did I mention…

Anvil Pro, as it has come to be known, is an ‘all inclusive’ storage utility that is definitely going to strike gold in the storage community. Its ability to test transfer speeds as well as IOPS is as impressive as are the controls that let the user tweak and adjust to find just the right mix in their testing medium. Never before have we had a single benchmark that tests transfer speeds as well as IOPS, the IOPS tests being fully configurable with preset testing scenarios for read, write and mixed IO. For the manufacturer, a simple 0Fill test will display the common RAW data tests shown in specifications whereas, for the hard core enthusiast, we can slide the bar over all the way and see how the SSD reacts to completely incompressible data samples.

A quick look at the initial screen shows us automatic identification of our system specs and SSD (in our case) as well as several disk transfer performance tests which identify response time, total MB read, IOPS and MB/s. The Benchmarks menu includes an SSD test, Endurance Testing, 3 pre-configured IOPS tests as we had discussed and an option to create our own test file manually.

USER WARNING: The Endurance Program was created to determine the typical lifespan of solid state drives and will run until your SSD will no longer function. As destructive as this function truly is, present day testing with this enhancement is showing that solid state drives will live much longer than the manufacturer has predicted in most cases. As with all software programs that we may assist in promoting, we cannot accept responsibility for undesirable outcomes in rare and unexpected scenarios.

The Settings Menu allows the user to configure just about every part of this program but one particular set of controls that stand out provide the ability to run tests at any of five compression levels, running the scale from compressible to incompressible data samples with specific sample composition for such things as database and application sample testing. A quick click will bring the images up to full size.

Last but not least, we thought we might give you a quick peak of the IO Write and Mixed IO Tests. Many will enjoy the ability to just slide the queue depth side to side and increase the block size with just a click, this being a world a way from where we stood with IOMeter.